CHAPTER XX.
A “CONSPIRACY TRIP.”
ZORKI was in a state of joyous excitement. The “Good Jew” of Gornovo, accompanied by a retinue of beadles, secretaries, “reciters,” attendants, scribes and hangers on, was pleased to grace the little community with his annual visit; so the Pietists had left their workshops and places of business to drink in religious ecstasy and to scramble for advice, miracles and the blessed leavings from the holy man’s table. The population of the little town was rapidly increasing by an influx of Pietists from neighbouring hamlets.
Clara, with a kerchief round her head, which gave her the appearance of an uneducated “daughter of Israel,” was watching a group of men and boys who stood chattering and joking in front of one of the best houses in town, at the edge of the market place. It was in this house where the Good Jew made his headquarters every time he came to Zorki and where he was now resting from his journey. The sun stood high. A peasant woman was nursing her baby in a waggon, patiently waiting for her husband. Two elderly peasants in coarse, broad-brimmed straw-hats, one of them with an interminable drooping moustache, were leaning against the weight-house, smoking silently. For the rest, the market place, enclosed by four broken rows of shops, dwellings and two or three government offices—squatting one-story frame structures—was almost deserted; but one of the two streets bounding it, the one on which we find Clara at this minute, was quite alive with people. An opening at one side of the square showed a sloping stretch of road and a rectangular section of the river, the same as that which gleamed in Miroslav. The knot of men which Clara was watching all wore broad flat-topped caps, and, most of them, long-skirted coats. A man of fifty-five, short and stocky, with massive head and swarthy face, the image of Makar, was the centre of the crowd.
“If you were a Pietist and a decent man,” he said, in subdued accents, to a red-bearded “oppositionist” with gloomy features, “you would not wear that long face of yours. Come, cheer up and don’t be a kill-joy!” And he slapped him on the back with all his might.
“Stop!” the Oppositionist said, reddening from the blow. “What’s got into you? What reason have you to be so jolly anyhow?” And addressing himself to the bystanders: “He has not had a drop of vodka, yet he will make believe he’s in his cups.”
“What’s that?” the swarthy man protested in a soft, mellow basso, “Can’t a fellow be jolly without filling himself full of vodka? If you were a respectable man and a Pietist and not a confounded seek-sorrow of an Oppositionist you would not think so. Drink! Why, open the Pentateuch, and wherever your eye falls there is drink to make you happy. ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth!’ Isn’t that reason enough for a fellow to be jolly?”
The bystanders smiled, some in partisan approbation, others with amused superiority, still others with diplomatic ambiguity.